"...he hasn’t really been riding these buses much at all They say, he’s been flying them...Apparently President Obama only rode the buses for a couple of miles at a time, spending the rest of the time flying from community to community in Air Force One. Whats more, the buses were flown from stop to stop as well... But why wouldn't the presidential limousine have sufficed Or one of the other armored vehicles that routinely travel with the President? Apparently because the President wanted the imagery of a bus. And buses are what he got...So good news America! If these reports are true, then not only do you get the pleasure of having a $1.1 million dollar bus carting the President around to “enlist” voters to fight for his reelection, but you get to marvel at the hypocrisy of an administration hell bent on destroying industries with carbon footprints too large for comfort, while they themselves are flying entire caravans of SUVs and buses in giant 747s flanked by fighter jets."

A House panel is calling on the U.S. Department of Labor to turn over all records involving a half-million dollar contract funded through President Obama’s $831 billion stimulus program that paid for more than 100 commercials on MSNBC touting a “green jobs” initiative.

The contract with McNeely Pigott & Fox Public Relations LLC in 2009 resulted in more than 100 commercials on cable shows hosted by Rachel Maddow and Keith Olberman to raise awareness about the Job Corps program’s training in environmentally-friendly career areas.

But spending reports showed that no jobs were created through the contract. The Washington Times first reported on the contract earlier this month, quoting one taxpayer watchdog who questioned not only the lack of jobs but why the commercials aired only on MSNBC, considered the most liberal of the major cable news outlets.

Republican leaders on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which oversees the Labor Department, are raising similar questions in a recent letter they sent to Labor Secretary Hilda Solis.

The letter, signed by Reps. John Kline of Minnesota, chairman of the committee, and Phil Roe of Tennessee, who chairs the panel’s subcommittee on health, employment, labor and pension issues, seeks all documents and communications concerning the public relations contract, as well as a list of dates, attendees and topics for any meetings between Labor officials and the public relations firm concerning the “public relations strategy.”

“Despite the fact that these funds were made available as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — legislation President Obama said was critical for immediate job creation — an examination of public records show that the contract that resulted in the advertisements on MSNBC created no jobs.”

A spokesman for the Labor Department, Stephen Barr, said officials have received the committee’s letter and will be responding.

In an earlier statement to The Times, Labor Department officials said there was nothing political about the placement of the ads. They said research showed the advertisements would reach the target demographic of business owners and managers interested in hiring “green-trained” employees through a programming list that initially also included shows hosted by CNN’s Larry King and public television’s Jim Lehrer.

Public television was eliminated because advertising rates were too high, officials said, and Mr. King’s show was dropped because MSNBC, since renamed NBCNews.com, held the potential to reach more viewers.

The use of tax dollars on media and advertising services also came under scrutiny from Democratic lawmakers during the George W. Bush administration. In 2006, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study requested by Democrats found more than $1.6 billion in public relations and media spending by the Bush administration during a two-year span.

President Obama marks end of combat operations in Iraq with another portrait of himselfTwitchy ^ | 8/31/12 | staff Posted on August 31, 2012 9:48:15 PM EDT by Nachum

Posted at 9:09 pm on August 31, 2012 by Twitchy Staff | View Comments

Barack Obama

✔

@BarackObama

A promise kept: pic.twitter.com/m7iLA3eF 31 Aug 12

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We’re certainly aware the president isn’t sitting in front of a copy of Photoshop putting these tweets together personally, but are we the only ones noticing a peculiar trend?

The Obama campaign recently honored the late astronaut Neil Armstrong by posting a photo of … Obama. So what better way to mark the anniversary of the end of combat operations in Iraq than by posting another photo of Obama?

U.S. and NATO officials have acknowledged that, in the rush to implement the President's politically calculated troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, Afghan troops were not properly vetted, which resulted in the deaths of 45 coalition members - most of them Americans - at the hands of their supposed Afghan allies.

Hence, in an extremely belated response, the senior commander of U.S. special forces in Afghanistan has finally decided to suspend training for all new Afghan recruits until they can be re-vetted...

The spike in green-on-blue attacks has forced NATO officials to concede the 'painful truth': Many of the attacks might have been prevented "if existing security measures had been applied correctly,"...

Numerous military guidelines were not adhered to by either Afghans or Americans because of concerns that they might impede the growth of the Afghan army and police...

Requirements that Afghan soldiers produce proper credentials while on base were also ignored.

One U.S. official said there was a lot of pressure to increase the size of the Afghan forces. Consequently, the vetting process was "was cast aside" because it was viewed as an impediment to accomplishing this goal.

But why was there was a lot of pressure to increase the size of the Afghan forces?

Because President Obama is exerting this pressure.

Mr. Obama [the Politician-in-Chief] insists on handing over primary responsibility for Afghanistan’s security to Afghan forces by the middle of 2013 and to withdraw all U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. That requires developing a sizable Afghan force in a short period of time, which is why stringent security measures and a thorough vetting process have not been properly implemented. And sadly, this has led to a huge spike in green-on-blue attacks, which has resulted in the deaths of U.S. and coalition troops....

The Obama administration circumvented federal law in announcing it would waive the work requirements in welfare, a GAO review found, saying that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should have submitted the new policy to Congress for review.

At issue is whether the policy falls under the purview of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) that requires all administrative changes of policy or regulation be submitted to Congress for review and possible disapproval.

...

HHS must formally submit the letter to Congress and the Comptroller General before it can legally issue the waivers to the requirement that a certain portion of welfare recipients work.

...

Camp, whose office released the GAO finding, said that HHS’ waiver policy amounted to an “end-run” around Congress.

“Despite his latest attempt at an end-run around Congress, this GAO report clearly states that the Administration must submit this rule to Congress for review before it can take effect. Work requirements were the centerpiece of welfare reform, and we cannot allow that progress to be undone,”

One of the centerpieces of the Democratic case for Barack Obama‘s reelection in Charlotte last week was the President’s record on national security – specifically, his decision to pursue the operation that eventually led to the death of Osama bin Laden.

That impressive achievement, however, may be blunted by the force of revelations by former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen in today’s Washington Post. Thiessen writes:

President Obama is touting his foreign policy experience on the campaign trail, but startling new statistics suggest that national security has not necessarily been the personal priority the president makes it out to be. It turns out that more than half the time, the commander in chief does not attend his daily intelligence meeting.

The Government Accountability Institute examined President Obama’s schedule from the day he took office until mid-June 2012, to see how often he attended his Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) — the meeting at which he is briefed on the most critical intelligence threats to the country. During his first 1,225 days in office, Obama attended his PDB just 536 times — or 43.8 percent of the time. During 2011 and the first half of 2012, his attendance became even less frequent — falling to just over 38 percent. By contrast, Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.

Thiessen was able to get comment from the White House’s National Security spokesman, Tommy Vietor, who told him, “The president gets the information he needs from the intelligence community each day.”

ADVERTISEMENTPresident Barack Obama told an audience in Nevada on Monday that he will be regularly announcing “executive actions” his administration will take to “heal the economy” without the “dysfunctional” Congress.

“I’m here to say to all of you and to say to the people of Nevada and the people of Las Vegas, we can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job. Where they won’t act, I will,” Obama said.

“I’ve told my administration to keep looking every single day for actions we can take without Congress, steps that can save consumers money, make government more efficient and responsive, and help heal the economy. And we’re going to be announcing these executive actions on a regular basis,” the president said.

Obama then explained the home mortgage refinancing plan that his administration announced on Monday.

“The barrier will be lifted that prohibits responsible homeowners from refinancing if their home values have fallen so low that what they owe on their mortgage is 25 percent higher than the current value of their home,” he said. “And this is critically important for a place like Las Vegas, where home values have fallen by more than 50 percent over the past five years.”

“If you’ve got a $250,000 mortgage at six percent interest rates, but the value of your home has fallen below $200,000, right now you can’t refinance,” Obama explained. “You’re ineligible. But that’s going to change. If you meet certain requirements, you will have the chance to refinance at lower rates, which could save you hundreds of dollars a month, and thousands of dollars a year on mortgage payments.”

Virginia Democratic Rep. Jim Moran told TheDC last Thursday that he would like to see the Obama administration refinance every home mortgage to three and a half to four percent without congressional approval. (RELATED: Obama admin. to offer home re-fi plan regardless ‘of how deeply underwater they are’)

“The banks aren’t doing it, but the federal government can borrow money at three-and-a-half percent today,” Moran said. “It would reset the economy, and I think it’s the one thing that would most quickly get this economy back on its feet.”

“Where we don’t have to wait for Congress, we’re just going to go ahead and act on our own, and we’re going to keep on putting pressure on Congress to do the right thing for families all across the country,” Obama said.

“And I am confident that the American people want to see action,” he said. “We know what to do. Question is whether we’re going to have the political will to do it.”

President Obama told his campaign volunteers in Nevada that he is “really proud” of them after comparing them to the U.S. ambassador and embassy staff murdered in Libya.

“And obviously [our] hearts are broken for the families but I wanted to encourage those folks at the State Dept. that they were making a difference,” Obama told volunteer leaders in Las Vegas, according to the pool report. “The sacrifices that our troops and our diplomats make are obviously very different from the challenges that we face here domestically but like them, you guys are Americans who sense that we can do better than we’re doing….I’m just really proud of you.”

7/19/12: The Amonix Solar: FAIL – manufacturing plant in North Las Vegas, subsidized by more than $20 million in federal tax credits and grants given by Obama Administration, has closed its 214,000 square foot facility a year after it opened.

Bright Source: FAIL - Bright Source warned Obama’s Energy Department officials in March 2011 that delays in approving a $1.6 billion U.S. loan guarantee would embarrass the White House and force the solar-energy company to close. Lost Billions of dollars but Getting More Money To Keep Trying. Can you say, “This isnt working?”

Solyndra: FAIL - Obama gave Solyndra $500,000,000 in taxpayer money and Solyndra shut its doors and laid off 1100 workers in August 2011 After Billions in Losses due to failure to make a solar product that works!

Abound Solar: FAIL - Abound Solar received a $400 million loan guarantee from Barack Obama announced in June, 2012 that it would file for bankruptcy

SunPower: FAIL – SunPower stopped producing solar cells last year at near bankruptcy restructured only with help of, get this, oil giant TOTAL who owns 60% stake. Irony! Still struggling…

Beacon Power: FAIL – Beacon Power Corp filed for bankruptcy Oct 2011 just a year after Obama approved $43 million loan Government loan guarantee

Ecotality: FAIL - ECOtality, a San Francisco green-tech company that never earned any money on the verge of bankruptcy after receiving roughly $115 million in two loan guarantees from Obama

A123 Solar: FAIL-A123 received $279 million from taxpayers thanks to President Obama’s Department of Energy loan guarantees and after Solyndra bankruptcy is getting another $500M from Obama and it has lost $400M

UniSolar: FAIL - Uni-Solar filed for Ch 11 bankruptcy in June 20 this year laid off hundreds got more Obama money still failing but still in business

Ener1: FAIL received more than $100 million in government funding from the Obama administration filed for bankruptcy January 2012

Update: In May 2012 Obama visited a dusty, desert town 30 miles outside Las Vegas Wednesday to declare he’s doubling down on failed federal efforts to boost the solar industry which has NEVER proven to produce a single working product. Like Socialism, no evidence ot works, but they just keep doubling down on the failed ideals!.

The White House indicated that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius would probably not be punished, after federal investigators determined she had violated the law when she campaigned earlier this year for President Obama.

Sebelius broke the law by making "extemporaneous partisan remarks" during a speech in February at a Human Rights Campaign Event in Charlotte, N.C., according to the Office of Special Counsel (OSC). She made the comments in the city that would later host the Democratic National Convention.

White House spokesman Eric Schultz explained in a statement that the administration has already taken action on the matter, though, putting Sebelius through training and making sure taxpayers were reimbursed.

Barack Obama is not a real president, though he does play one on TV. So what is he? It's my contention that the bizarre creature currently residing in the White House is an attractive spokesmodel for our destruction, sponsored by America's mortal foes.

The time for politely mincing words is over. After the Democrats booed God and Jerusalem at their national convention; after Obama refused to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as Israel faces nuclear destruction; after Obama enthroned the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the Middle East and then apologized for America when our embassies were fatally attacked there on 9/11 -- well, really, what's the point of making nice?

Forget calling Obama "incompetent." This tiresome meme presupposes that Obama wants to do what's right for America but doesn't know how. Does anyone honestly believe that anymore?

Yes, he's incompetent, in that he's a fairly unimpressive bloke with no skills, imagination, or ability to learn, who couldn't run a third-rate laundromat.

But so what? His sponsors didn't install him for his competence. They installed him so that he could strut on the runways of the world, showing off his fashionable skin color and perfectly creased pants, while babbling whatever useful venom they put on his teleprompter.

As the body of America's Libyan ambassador was dragged through the streets and three other American embassy workers lay dead, we learned that Obama attended only 38% of his intelligence briefings in 2012. In fact, he didn't attend a single intelligence briefing in the week preceding 9/11. So ask yourself: would the outcome be any different if he had?

Of course not. Does L'Oréal spokesmodel Beyoncé attend board meetings in which the location of new factories or other nitty-gritty corporate business is decided? Why should she? Her job is to go out there and look good and sell the brand.

And thus our Spokesmodel-in-Chief, who found no opening in his schedule to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu, somehow made the time to appear on the 9/11 radio show of "The Pimp with a Limp," fly to Las Vegas, and clown around with David Letterman. Next up is a fundraiser at the 40/40 Club in Manhattan with fellow spokesmodel Beyoncé, and a whirlwind of similar brand-promoting frippery, as the world burns.

If you haven't figured out the nature of the brand that Obama is promoting, the Democrats helpfully informed us in their opening convention video: "Thegovernment is the only thing we all belong to." We all belong to the government, and the government is Obama -- so we all belong to Obama, that exciting celebrity with the big smile who loves to give us free stuff. And now that we've been docilely collectivized, our celebrity friend, "President Obama," can deliver us into submission at the hands of those who despise us.

And thus, "President Obama" will have "more flexibility" to surrender to the Russians, whose warships he displayed at his convention, after his election. And when rabid Islamists storm American embassies, and sodomize and murder an American ambassador, the reaction of "President Obama's" White House is to abjectly apologize to the protestors for America's right to free speech. Meanwhile, "President Obama" weakens and undermines America's military, leaving us ever more vulnerable in an increasingly chaotic world.

Who is this "President Obama" who puts such an appealing face on our destruction? Just a few weeks before the election, we still don't really know. Two gripping documentaries, 2016 and Dreams From My Real Father, portray different aspects of his background, exposing the America-hating fervor of his various mentors.

A blockbuster hit, 2016 examines the anti-colonial politics of his purported father, the Harvard-educated Kenyan governmental economist, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. With its glossy production values brought to you by Schindler's List producer Gerald Molen, 2016 takes us on a fast-paced tour of Obama Sr.'s worldview, in which villainous America and the West must be humbled for deliberately ravaging the third world. Along the way, we meet freedom-hating influences on "President Obama," including terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers, leading Israel-basher Professor Edward Said, and card-carrying Communist agitator Frank Marshall Davis.

It's Frank Marshall Davis who takes center stage in Joel Gilbert's fascinating documentary, Dreams From My Real Father. Gilbert contends that Davis was Obama's biological father and deploys some compelling physical and circumstantial evidence to make his point. Even Obama's pre-presidential nose job can't mask the physical resemblance of the two men, and Frank Marshall Davis's side job as a pornographer allowed him access to Obama's teen mother, as Gilbert's photo cache dismayingly proves.

But whoever spawned "President Obama," the end result is the empty, angry Spokesmodel-in-Chief, whose sponsors now hold our fate in their hands. While Obama preens and prances around the country, the real workers continue their destruction of our national security and economy, strangling us with a $16-trillion debt and another threatened downgrade. The Spokesmodel saw no need to attend any job council meetings as 23 million Americans suffered without work; those jobs could be destroyed without any personal input from him.

Now the Spokesmodel's contract is up for renewal, and like all successful celebrities, he's demanding we pay a higher price for his services. If he wins, many Americans may be forced to pay the ultimate price.

Government officials blame unfair competition from China for the collapse of solar panel manufacturer Solyndra, but such concerns didn’t stop the federal government from breaking stimulus program rules to use Chinese solar panels atop a federal building housing the offices of a senator, congressman and several agencies.

Even the contractor questioned whether Chinese-made panels could be used under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the stimulus program that mandated use of U.S.-made products. His query in early 2010 was dismissed and the General Services Administration moved forward with using the Chinese panels on the Sen. Paul Simon Federal Building in Carbondale, Ill., records show.

Questions about the panels, which were assembled overseas, were raised in a four-page advisory memo sent by the inspector general to the GSA in the summer of 2011, but the findings take on added significance as government officials increasingly place blame on Chinese subsidies for troubles in the U.S. solar market.

Since last summer, Solyndra LLC and another solar company, Abound Solar, have filed for bankruptcy despite receiving generous federal loan guarantees. After both bankruptcies, government officials were quick to place blame on subsidies from China that allowed foreign solar panel manufactures to sell their products below cost, squeezing U.S. solar companies.

Meanwhile, the contractor on the Illinois building project, J.R. Conkey & Associates, initially questioned GSA officials on whether solar panels assembled in China could be used under the stimulus program, but a procurement officer told the company to proceed, according to records.

“We did what we were told to do by the federal government,” Jim Conkey, the company’s president, said Monday.

According to the inspector general’s memo, Conkey officials asked the GSA contracting official “whether non-ARRA [Recovery Act] compliant solar panels could be used” on Feb. 16, 2010, before the installation of the panels.

“The contracting officer directed Conkey to ‘proceed with the panels specified in the schedule contract since they have already been determined as satisfying all applicable contract clauses including the ARRA Buy American Act requirement,’ ” the memo stated.

The inspector general’s memo said the overall roof work was performed under a $1.8 million task order awarded to J.R. Conkey & Associates, though Mr. Conkey said a portion of the project involving stimulus funding for the panels at issue involved about $200,000.

Dan Cruz, a GSA spokesman, said an agency review found no other instances of GSA projects using solar panels made outside of the U.S.

In a written response to the inspector general last year, officials also disagreed with several aspects of the review. The Federal Acquisition Service, an arm of the GSA, said the contract to J.R. Conkey was for a “complex roof mounted electrical grid system” and that the panel in question — the SP205 — was “one component of this overall system.”

“Here, the panels themselves are not a contract item” the service’s response stated. “Rather, they are an important part of a solar system, but are integrated along with an inverter, tubes and other components into a system.”

And for purchases of such systems, the Trade Agreements Act, not the Buy America Act, applies, according to Federal Acquisition Service officials, who added that only the Bureau of Customs, now a part of the Department of Homeland Security, could make a determination of [Trade Agreements Act] compliance.

Still, the inspector general’s memo stated that the panels violated the provisions of the stimulus program, according to the memo.

“The photovoltaic panels installed were assembled in and shipped from China,” the memo stated. “Under the ARRA, the Chinese panels cannot be purchased with ARRA funds.”

An investigation by the Government Accountability Institute found that more than half of the most politically active 50 campaign bundlers for President Obama were either appointed to a presidential council, committee, board, or other White House post. Many bundlers’ businesses or relatives' businesses also received millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded federal contracts, grants, loans, or other crony perks.

In all, the top 50 bundlers received three council appointments, one ambassadorship, two committee appointments, and a whopping 20 State Dinner invitations. Two bundlers were also placed on a presidential board, and another two were picked for other White House posts.

Bundling campaign donations for Mr. Obama can produce a lucrative return on “investment” in the form of crony deals. For example, one of the president’s biggest bundlers, Penny Pritzker, is the national co-chair of Obama for America 2012 and was a member of President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Mrs. Pritzker has bundled at least $904,957 for Mr. Obama. A former board member of the Marmon Group, the Pritzker family owns as much as 40% of Marmon while Berkshire Hathaway owns the rest. Marmon and Berkshire own IMPulse, a transit-manufacturing firm, located in Mount Olive, North Carolina. IMPulse received or directed numerous construction projects that received millions in taxpayer-funded stimulus money. Among others, those projects include:

•A $485.8 million contract that was awarded for the extension of the Metro Gold Line from Pasadena to Azusa

•The Portland streetcar eastside loop which received $75 million in funds The value of the projects that IMPulse Manufacturing received total nearly $1 billion in American Recovery Reinvestment Act funding.

In 2010 testimony before the House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure on the “Recovery Act: Progress Report for Highway, Transit, and Wastewater Infrastructure Formula Investments," Jeffery Wharton, president of IMPulse Manufacturing, LLC explained:

IMPulse is a Marmon Group / Berkshire Hathaway Company. We are a member of the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) and I serve on the APTA Board of Directors, but my testimony today is on behalf of my company.

I am pleased to report that IMPulse’s new project business has grown 35% in 2009 and expected to grow at least another 10% to 15% in 2010.I do not believe my business would have survived without the investment in public transportation by way of the ARRA stimulus funding. In 2009, ARRA partially funded projects accounted for 46% of my total sales. In 2010, I anticipate the ARRA type funded projects will account for 62% of my total sales.

What's more, Nicholas Pritzker is chairman of the board and senior development adviser of the Pritzker family-owned Hyatt Hotels Corp. He invested an unspecified amount in Tesla Motors, the electric car company that received a $465 million interest-bearing loan from the DOE. Another Obama bundler who has seemingly gained from his presidential fundraising is Richard Richman, chairman of the Richman Group. In September 2010, the Richmans held a $30,000 a plate fundraising dinner for Obama in their 20-acre estate in Greenwich, Connecticut. They also donated $50,000 to Obama's inaugural. In total, the Richmans have bundled $1,073,750 for Mr. Obama.

And what did they get in return for their fundraising efforts? Richman Group’s Balton-Douglass Park--a $100 million mixed use, mixed income development which will hold 226 apartments in central Harlem--received a $21 million subsidy through the stimulus.

Ellen Richman is listed five times as a visitor in the White House visitors database, and Richard Richman is listed four times since December 2009. They also attended the March 14, 2012 State Dinner.

Mark Gallogly also came up a big winner in the Obama bundler-a-thon. In total, Mr. Gallogly has bundled $903,834 for Mr. Obama. Gallogly serves on the board of Dana Holdings Corp., a manufacturer of drivetrains and other industrial parts. Until earlier this year, Dana Holdings was heavily involved in a joint venture with Eaton Corp., another manufacturer who received numerous stimulus grants, on a line of products known as Roadranger. Roadranger received $3.1 million in stimulus funds for a line of plug in vehicles. Additionally, Dana Holdings supplies parts for Tesla Motors, which received a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy.

Gallogly was appointed to the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board and has visited the White House 39 times.

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Institute says it will release its findings for Mitt Romney’s bundlers next week. The organization says the Romney campaign’s refusal to release the names and amounts of all its bundlers made analyzing possible crony connections more difficult.

“If Romney wants the transparency and anti-cronyism themes to catch fire,” writes Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer, “he needs to do the right thing and release the names of his bundlers.”

My readers were dumbfounded when I picked the 2012 Seahawks to make the Super Bowl. By Sunday night, I was equally dumbfounded. Somehow, Seattle couldn't hold a fourth-quarter lead against an ice-cold Kevin Kolb. An ice-cold Kevin Kolb??? I spent Monday and Tuesday regrouping, and by Wednesday, I was ready to start cranking out excuses. (Come on, you knew this was coming — it was a bigger lock than Adrian Grenier being available for the new Entourage movie.) Climb into the Excuse Machine with me, would you?

I thought about using these first three excuses before realizing they were total reaches:

Excuse No. 1: Spending a month in London and immersing myself in the Olympics inadvertently murdered my feel for the 2012 NFL season. That's four weeks without SportsCenter, the NFL Network, sports radio, NFL Live, and USA Today Sports Weekly. That's four weeks of missing out on Skip and Stephen A forcing each other to argue about Tebow. That's four lost weeks of Grantland office arguments — including multiple chances for me to say, "I'm thinking about picking Seattle to make the Super Bowl," followed by Robert Mays recoiling in horror and saying, "Are you on bath salts again?"

Excuse No. 2: In London, they call soccer "football" and get snotty anytime you refer to the NFL or college football as "football." By embracing London and English people in general, that meant I was embracing their definition of "football." Maybe the real football gods took it personally. That means I have to renounce London, deny that I ever considered moving there permanently, stop saying things like "one of my biggest regrets is never studying abroad there," and go back to despising British people and making Revolutionary War jokes. Consider it done.

Excuse No. 3: Had either Doug Baldwin or Braylon Edwards held on to game-winning touchdown passes on totally catchable throws, the Seahawks would be 1-0 and I'd be selling tickets for obstructed seats on the sold-out bandwagon. Even if you might debunk this by saying, "Isn't that a bad sign that your Super Bowl sleeper threw game-deciding passes to Doug Baldwin and Braylon Edwards?," I can pick that argument apart in three words: Yeah, but still.

(This next excuse might have some legs, though … )

Excuse No. 4: We're 14 weeks away from the Mayans being proven wrong about 2012, but one of their less-ballyhooed predictions came true: "In 2012, Bill Simmons will suffer a prolonged and humiliating gambling swoon." A quick recap …

• In August of 2011, I made a Patriots/Super Bowl wager (5-to-1 odds) and eventually ended up with a dream gambling scenario for Super Bowl XLVI — the Patriots being favored by three points, making it impossible for me to lose if I hedged the right amount with the Giants. Did I hedge? Of course not! You can't hedge with your favorite team! But hey, at least the Pats didn't blow the game in the most agonizing way possible.

• In March, I bought my daughter a $20 Stanley Cup ticket for the Kings (15-to-1 odds!) that, of course, she lost during the playoffs. Disappeared in her room. Vanished. The good news — I became the first father in history to console a sobbing 7-year-old girl after she lost a $300 Vegas ticket. Welcome to gambling, sweetie!

• My post-lockout NBA strategy of "Keep going the other way against Miami, they'll eventually choke" couldn't have worked out worse. I lost not once, not twice, not three times … oh, and don't think I didn't have a series bet on the Spurs trouncing Oklahoma City in the Western Conference finals.

Current federal regulations plus those coming under Obamacare will cost American taxpayers and businesses $1.8 trillion annually, more than twenty times the $88 billion the administration estimates, according to a new roundup provided to Secrets from the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute.

And it could grow, warned the author of the report, Clyde Wayne Crews, a CEI vice president.

Complying with Health and Human Services Department requirements alone, he revealed, costs $184 billion a year, yet regulators are still drafting the rules for the 2,400-page Obamacare law that kicks into gear in 2014.

Crews has made a working project of his "Tip of the Costberg" report which he regularly updates. In it, he compares the cost of regulations estimated by federal agencies to a much broader list of estimates from multiple federal and independent sources. And even then, he said, it doesn't include hard-to-calculate costs associated with antitrust intervention, regulation of electricity networks, or the cost of constrained access to natural resources.

"While OMB officially reports amounts of only up to $88.6 billion in 2010 dollars," said Crews, "the non-tax cost of government intervention in the economy, without performing a sweeping survey, appears to total up to $1.806 trillion annually."

But, he added, "according to back of the envelope surveys and roundups, with gaps big enough to fit the beltway through, that up to $1.806 trillion annually and in many categories perhaps even considerably more, is a defensible assessment of the annual impact on the economy."

His estimate is close to the $1.7 trillion estimate from the Small Business Administration which the White House distanced itself from. For comparison, the total U.S. GDP is $15 trillion.

The wave of Obama regulations has become a huge sore point in the business world with groups as large as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce down to the International Franchise Association crying for fewer rules. The administration, however, argues that the rules and regulations pushed out under the president have made products and workplaces safer.

How can any cogent American citizen possibly even consider voting for Barack Obama now? That's what lots of conservatives and moderates are asking each other, again and again. It's completely baffling, to those who grew up with any sort of sense of what America means and what the American character traditionally has been, that anybody can look at the man's record and want more of the same.

Almost the entirety of the Muslim world is now rioting against an American president who promised that his olive branches to Muslims would secure peace. Like Jimmy Carter, Obama has only shown a weakness that has emboldened the Islamist haters. Meanwhile, our closest ally in the region, Israel, a stable representative democracy led by an American-educated, America-loving prime minister, has repeatedly been insulted, abandoned, and undermined. In short, the United States is in worse position with all sides in the Middle East/northern Africa. We are embarrassed, feckless, wounded... and in four tragic cases, dead.

Allies in Poland and the Czech Republic have been repeatedly let down and sometimes insulted. The "re-set" with Russia earned us only Russian contempt. China and Russia ignore our entreaties around the world, with absolute disdain for our wishes, our olive branches, or Obama's supposedly Nobel-worthy and messianic genius for diplomacy.

Domestically, our debt has increased by 50 percent in just four years, by some $5 trillion, with not a single observable benefit from the spending. Our bond rating already has been downgraded by one agency, and another major agency threatens to downgrade us. Our unemployment rate has never been beneath 8 percent since Obama's first month in office, even though his economic team said his outrageously expensive "stimulus" package would ensure that it would never rise above 8 percent, and indeed that it would drop below 6 percent within four years.

Our politics is more fractured, less civil, than ever -- and as Bob Woodward, of all people, indicates in his new book, this is largely the fault of Obama. He has been the first president in history to push through a major new program without a single vote from the opposing party -- and while refusing to incorporate a single major idea from the other party, while ignoring overwhelming public sentiment to pass it, and while bending the rules in multiple ways to force it through Congress. Meanwhile, on the real business of Congress, his Senate allies have ignored longstanding law by refusing to pass a budget for three years now, while twice rejecting the president's own pitiful budget proposal by unanimous votes.

Obama campaigned with a promise to rein in abuses of executive power, but instead he increasingly rules by executive decrees of dubious constitutionality. Congress won't pass cap-and-trade, so he orders it anyway. Congress won't pass amnesty for illegal immigrants, so he orders it anyway. Congress won't undermine the work requirement in the welfare system, so he guts the work requirements by executive order. And on and on go the abuses.

His Justice Department is flagrantly corrupt and racialist. It told a black majority town in North Carolina that it could not hold nonpartisan elections because voters would fail to elect the black "candidates of choice" if the candidate weren't identified as Democrats. It intervened against the heroic Fire Department of New York to push racial hiring quotas on the department so outrageous that it would force admittance into the fire academy of candidates who missed as many as 70 percent (!!!) of the questions on a simple entrance exam; and, in blocking all applicants expected to be hired under the previous exam, it prohibited a number of black applicants who actually had met standards from being hired. So outrageous was this abuse that even the leftist Village Voice ran a long feature story taking up for the qualified black applicants whose chances for employment were dashed.

And, of course, DoJ ran an idiotic gun-running program on the Mexican border that led to the deaths of two American agents and countless Mexicans while drawing a rebuke from the Mexican ambassador, and then covered up and even lied about its actions. Also, infamously, it dropped already-won cases against New Black Panther thugs for flagrant voter-intimidation outside a Philadelphia polling place in 2008 -- dropped the cases, indeed, just in time, meaning four days in advance, for one of those thugs again to serve as an official Democratic Party poll-watcher in municipal elections in 2009.

Gasoline prices are twice what they were when Obama took office -- and rising again. The housing market remains in the doldrums. Food stamp use is by far at the highest level in history, and poverty is markedly up. Food prices are markedly higher. Small businesses are jettisoning the health-insurance benefits they offered employees until Obamacare made it prohibitively expensive. Doctors are retiring in record numbers rather than face Obamacare's scourges -- and most of the law hasn't yet taken effect. Coming soon are new taxes on medical device manufacturers: Patients will pay more for wheelchairs, prosthetics, insulin pumps, asthma inhalers, pacemakers, and other essential fruits of modern medical technology.

Taxpayers are on the hook for huge losses from the auto bailouts, even as most of GM's new jobs have been created overseas rather than here, and even as auto dealerships across the nation were shut down by administration fiat on political bases rather than on the basis of which ones were profitable. Taxpayers are on the hook for politically inspired "investments" to Obama cronies in failing businesses such as Solyndra. Taxpayers are on the hook for higher electricity prices due to a backdoor cap-and-trade scheme imposed by (illegal) administrative fiat.

Religious liberties, meanwhile, are under repeated and sustained attacked from an administration openly hostile to traditional faith. And the president even refuses to defend in federal court laws duly passed by Congress and signed by former President Clinton.

The parade of abuses, incompetencies, extravagances, and illegalities goes on and on. The record of improvements in any sector of American life is… well, nil. Nothing is better, not a single thing, at home or abroad. And Obama has offered no recognizable plans, no new proposals, no substance at all, for making things better in a second term.

This presidency is a disaster. Reasonable people are gobsmacked at the possibility that it could somehow be allowed to continue its degradations of American society.

About the Author

Quin Hillyer is a senior editor of The American Spectator and a senior fellow at the Center for Individual Freedom. Follow him on Twitter @QuinHillyer.

During a Fox News Sunday interview, the host said, "The President has blocked out time to appear on The View on Tuesday. So, he has time for Whoopi Goldberg but he doesn’t have time for world leaders?" (video follows with transcript and absolutely no need for commentary):

Buy a "Journalists for Obama" T-shirt to let them know where you stand!

CHRIS WALLACE, HOST: I want to go back to the UN though and New York this week. You say that he’s got schedules, that foreign leaders have schedules. But the President has blocked out time to appear on The View on Tuesday. So, he has time for Whoopi Goldberg but he doesn’t have time for world leaders?

ROBERT GIBBS, OBAMA SENIOR CAMPAIGN ADVISER: No, Chris. Look, the President is going to be actively involved at the UN General Assembly.

WALLACE: He’s not meeting with any private leaders. He's giving a speech.

GIBBS: Chris, they have telephones in the White House. Last week, he talked to the President of Egypt. He talked to the leader in Libya. We don't need a meeting in Washington just to confer with leaders. We’ve got a strong...

WALLACE: But he does need the time to be on The View?

GIBBS: We have a strong diplomatic – I’m sure if he was doing an interview with you on Fox News, you’d have no problem with that.

Former FDIC chairman Sheila Bair has a new book out slamming Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his handling of the bank bailouts during the financial crisis.

Bair went on CNBC's Power Lunch today to discuss her book "Bull by the Horns" in which she dubs Geithner "the bailouter in chief" during the crisis.

Here are some key points from her appearance:

"I think [Geithner] viewed the problems through the prism of the large financial institutions, particularly Citigroup, and his worldview was if you help them out of their troubles you're going to help out the economy. I wanted to impose some market accountability. I wanted bondholders to take losses, I wanted those who had lent money to these institutions, the investors, to share more of the pain and share more of the risk. I think it was just a constant conflict throughout…There was just a philosophic disagreement throughout my tenure."

"I do know that my voice wasn't heard as it should, I was not included in as many meetings as I should have been. I was not given any advance warning on our actions."

"We didn't help homeowners, we didn't tackle the way we should have, we didn't clean up the bank balance sheets. It continues to be a drag on the economy and there remains horrible public cynicism and anger towards Washington and toward large financial institution. There's this perception that the game is rigged, everybody in Washington is captive, and it was all created by the bailout. It still makes me angry."

WASHINGTON -- Former bank regulator Sheila Bair cringed when President Barack Obama promised at an Arizona high school gymnasium in 2009 that his administration could save millions of homes from foreclosure.

"If lenders and home buyers work together, and the lender agrees to offer rates that the borrower can afford, then we'll make up part of the gap between what the old payments were and what the new payments will be," Obama said, explaining the program with Bair at his side. "And this will enable as many as 3 to 4 million homeowners to modify the terms of their mortgages to avoid foreclosure."

In her new book, "Bull by the Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself," Bair recounts how her own housing proposals were passed over in favor of a much weaker program, which she knew would never save 4 million homes. Bair served as chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation until July 2011.

"At the Phoenix announcement, the president was masterful in announcing the program, though I cringed as he threw out what I considered to be wildly inflated numbers on the programs' impact," Bair wrote. "Even with our own, more aggressive proposal, we had estimated the number of successful modifications at 2.1 million tops."

The plan, known officially as the Home Affordable Modification Program, offers struggling homeowners reduced monthly payments through a standardized modification process. The program won't reach its goal of 3 to 4 million restructured loans, but it recently achieved a sadder milestone: 1 million failed modifications. Fewer than 900,000 homeowners are making modified payments, which are typically $500 lower than before the modification.

The huge number of loans that needed to be reworked, combined with burdensome documentation requirements and a lackluster effort on the part of banks' mortgage servicing divisions, guaranteed the program was "doomed to failure," according to Bair.

"What's more, it cheated borrowers," she wrote. "Because Treasury wanted to demonstrate quickly that huge numbers of borrowers were being modified, it let borrowers enter into 'trial modifications' whereby they would start making reduced payments pending completion of all of their paperwork. But many of the borrowers could not provide all of the extensive documentation required by the program, so they would be put into foreclosure even though they had been making timely payments for months!"

Bair's book describes Obama as engaged and knowledgable about housing recovery efforts, but undermined by his aides, particularly Treasury Secretary Tim Geither and former economic adviser Larry Summers.

"HAMP was a program designed to look good in a press release, not to fix the housing market," Bair wrote. "Larry and Tim didn't seem to care about the political beating the president took on the hundreds of billions of dollars thrown at the big-bank bailouts and AIG bonuses, but when it came to home owners, it was a very different story. I don't think helping home owners was ever a priority for them."

Bair's book echoes the criticism in Neil Barofsky's "Bailout," another recent insider account of the Obama administration's housing failures.

Obama claim that Bush is 90% responsible for current deficit gets 100% of Pinocchios at WaPo

posted at 10:01 am on September 26, 2012 by Ed Morrissey

I hit this 60 Minutes quote two days ago in yesterday’s OOTD, but it’s worth revisiting in the form of Glenn Kessler’s fact check at the Washington Post. Kessler misses one of the biggest problems with Barack Obama’s response to Steve Kroft’s question, which was about national debt, and Obama responded by talking about deficits — two different issues, although related. I’ll put the question and the longer answer provided by Kessler together, emphases mine:

KROFT: The national debt has gone up sixty percent in — in the four years that you’ve been in office.

OBAMA: Well, first — first of all, Steve, I think it’s important to understand the context here. When I came into office, I inherited the biggest deficit in our history. And over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but ninety percent of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren’t paid for, as a consequence of tax cuts that weren’t paid for, a prescription drug plan that was not paid for, and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Now we took some emergency actions, but that accounts for about 10 percent of this increase in the deficit, and we have actually seen the federal government grow at a slower pace than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower, in fact, substantially lower than the federal government grew under either Ronald Reagan or George Bush.

Now, if the deficit goes up, the solution would be to either spend less or tax more. Obama has done neither in any of his budget proposals, and as I wrote yesterday, his last two budget proposals would have made the situation worse — which is why even his own party gave neither of them so much as one supporter in three floor votes. Furthermore, the FY2009 budget in place when Obama took office was the creation of the Democrat-controlled House and Senate from the year before, and it was signed into law by Obama in March 2009, not Bush, after Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid played keep-away in the fall of 2008. Barack Obama was part of that effort as a member of the Senate.

Kessler skips over these points to address Obama’s argument that the structural deficit is 90% George Bush’s problem. Kessler says it’s the other way around — that Bush policies account for about 10% of the current annual structural budget deficit, and the rest is evenly split between bad projections from the CBO and Obama’s spending and economic policies:

As can be seen above, CBO’s errors in forecasting played a large role in the demise of the projected surpluses. CBO had kept counting on a gusher of capital gains revenue — and then obviously failed to predict the recession of 2008.

But Obama’s policies also played a big role during his presidency. Using the CBO data for the years 2009-2011, here’s a very rough calculation of the contribution to the deficit. To keep things simple, we did not try to allocate interest expense, and we did not include categories of spending or taxes that were difficult to allocate.

The 2009 fiscal year is especially hard because that budget year is so much of an amalgam of Bush and Obama policies; we essentially split the cost of the Troubled Asset Relief Program between the two of them. Since this is not intended to be exact, but illustrative, we have rounded numbers and percentages:

Clearly, a huge part of the deficit problem — about half — stems from the recession and forecasting errors. But Obama’s policies represent a big chunk as well.

So how many Pinocchios does Obama get? One hundred percent of them:

Obama certainly inherited an economic mess, and that accounts for a large part of the deficit. But Obama pushed for spending increases and tax cuts that also have contributed in important ways to the nation’s fiscal deterioration. He certainly could argue that these were necessary and important steps to take, but he can’t blithely suggest that 90 percent of the current deficit “is as a consequence” of his predecessor’s policies — and not his own.

As for the citing of the discredited MarketWatch column, we have repeatedly urged the administration to rely on estimates from official government agencies, such as the White House budget office. It is astonishing to see the president repeat this faulty claim once again, as if it were an established fact. Four Pinocchios[.]

And as Kessler points out, the real structural bomb to annual deficits has yet to be triggered. ObamaCare may be deficit neutral in its first ten years — which is still arguable, and based on a fiscal shell game — but after that, “all bets are off